An email is subdivided into two parts by the “@” character, and they are: the first part before (left) the “@” character is the recipient's email address; and the second part (right) after the “@” character is the email server domain—name of the email server. Once a email sender sends a email to a email recipient, the sending server will parse the email and send it to the receiving email server, the server domain indicated at the right of the “@” sign. Once the email server receives the email it will match it against email recipient indicated on the left of the “@” sign.
Many vendors of electronic mail servers, as well as many third-party vendors, offer spam-blocking software to detect, label and sometimes automatically remove spam. Presently, there exist many methods for detecting, labeling and removing spam.
A representative method is taught in the U.S. Patent publication 20030200334 ('334 publication). The '334 publication teaches a method where the recipient's email is encrypted and the encrypted part is concatenated with the sender's email information thus hiding the recipient's email and exposing the sender's email.
The '334 publication on one hand hides the recipient's email and on the other hand exposes the sender's email to spammer. Furthermore, the '334 publication requires complex and resource extensive public-encryption software and hardware for the purpose of encrypting and decrypting emails.